N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Yesterday on page 666 I posted: | Quote | | Dear God ...... If it is not too much trouble, please could you once again arrange for Dr. Dr. Dembski to embarrass himself? Preferably soon? |
and by this afternoon we have Dembski's notpology. That's what I call a quick positive response.
So the Evolutionary Informatics Lab website is back up, with Dr. Dr. Dembski’s name (listed as William A Dembski, Ph.D., Ph.D.!!!)., and Dembski simultaneously removes the posts with Baylor’s regents’ home phone numbers, the faked letter from Lilley, and the e-mail between Irons and Lilley, as well as posting his not-pology.
I think a deal was cut, and it may mean that Dembski gets to go to the cafeteria. My guess at the conversation is:
Regents to Lilley: All these calls from these ID assholes are seriously annoying. Make it stop.
Lilley to Regents: But this is Dembski we are talking about.
Regents to Lilley: Doesn’t matter, make it stop.
Baylor’s lawyer to Dembski: Pull that post, or we’ll sue.
Dembski to a DI legal friend: Can they do that?
DI legal friend to Dembski: No. Freedom of speech and all that.
Dembski’s legal friend to Baylor’s lawyer: You can’t make us. And Marks and Dembski are going to sue over academic freedom.
Baylor’s lawyer to Dembski's lawyer: But we can try, and we have much deeper pockets than you. However, we won’t bring suit if you’ll take down those posts and post an apology.
Dembski’s lawyer: OK, if you let the lab website back up and let Dembski’s name be associated.
Baylor’s lawyer: OK, if you add a disclaimer that none of this has anything to do with Baylor.
Dembski’s lawyer: OK, but Dembski's family gets to eat at the cafeteria.
Baylor. We'll see. Don't push it.
The paragraph about doing three wrong things clearly fulfills some lawyer's directives and constitutes a legal apology. | Quote | Nonetheless, on this blog I went too far in trying to hold up the Baylor administration’s actions to the light of day. I let it get personal and went over the edge in three things: (1) posting a parody letter attributed to Baylor President Lilley; (2) posting contact information for the Baylor Board of Regents in an effort to apply pressure to the Baylor administration; (3) posting an exchange between Peter Irons and John Lilley largely for the purpose of embarassing both.
I’ve removed all three posts and herewith extend a public apology to the Baylor administration and Board of Regents for these actions on this blog. |
Everything else is a not-pology, where Dembski tries to maintain a little dignity and simultaneously stick in a shiv or two: | Quote | In offering this apology, however, I mean in no way to mitigate the gravity of Baylor’s wrong in censoring the research of Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab.
Without moralizing, I want to suggest a lesson in all this. Stay on topic and don’t let things get personal. I hurt my family and lost about three weeks of productive work by being consumed with anger about the injustice against Robert Marks. It’s not worth it. Let’s get on with our work and leave justice in the hands of a God who has reason to find fault with all of us and yet is merciful. |
That last bit looks like a final try for the high road, but, sorry, Bill, we are all too familiar with the farty noises and all your blog-mates.
Dembski's lead-off quote from his anonymous friend from England is worth a mention as well: | Quote | This is loaded with extreme polemical language almost from the first sentence. I find it so biased that I simply cannot get beyond the first page. That the editor is proud to present this polemical babble is astonishing. If this is the best that the ’scientific establishment’ can do, then that establishment is culturally decadent.
It confirms what I have worried about for a long time: that science today simply does not have the cultural depth, the conceptual and linguistic resources, to conduct civilized scholarly debate about its foundational commitments and assumptions. Thomas Huxley would be deeply embarrassed by this article. If you have to deal daily with this kind of low polemic there is a real danger of being dragged down to their level. I am more sympathetic than ever with what you have to deal with. |
This is an interesting combination of an attempt at self-justification with another attack on mainstream scientists. (It is no less interesting that Dembski tries to pass it off to an anonymous friend from England. Could this be Blotnik at work again?) It would be more impressive if Dembski was not so solidly on the side that cannot conduct a civilized debate about foundational commitments and assumptions. Quite apart from not involving giving federal judges funny voices and canned flatulence-tracks, and not posting faked letters from people, scientific debate requires fundamental honesty, that facts be presented clearly and honestly, that the data not be "cooked", that opponents' arguments be presented fairly and be confronted with honest data rather than lies and rhetoric. Dembski's side earns emnity by refusing to play by these ground rules. Dembski is not so bad himself, but look at Salvador's quote-mines, Jonathan Wells' distortions, the way Salvador and Denyse don't bother to understand relevant details before launching into their arguments, and so on and so forth.
Incidentally, Paul Gross's article is a nice read:
http://www.nas.org/publications/sci_newslist/7_4/sci_insght74.pdf
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